The Sindice-2011 dataset for entity-oriented search in the Web of data

The task of entity retrieval becomes increasingly prevalent as more and more (semi-) structured information about objects is available on the Web in the form of documents embedding metadata (RDF, RDFa, Microformats and others). However, research and development in that direction is dependent on (1) the availability of a representative corpus of entities that are found on the Web, and (2) the availability of an entity-oriented search infrastructure for experimenting new retrieval model. In this paper, we introduce the Sindice-2011 data collection which is derived from the data collected by the Sindice semantic search engine. The data collection is especially designed for supporting research in the domain of web entity retrieval. We describe how the corpus is organised, discuss statistics of the data collection, and introduce a search infrastructure to foster research and development.